The Beards Are Ruling.

Yesterday was the birthday of a cousin who is very dear to me. I dedicate this post to him.

Apart from all the other reasons for his being dear to me is his loyalty to my blog. After the greetings and responses were over on the telephone, he asked me why I don’t blog as often as I used to till a few weeks ago. I answered that I found no topics to write on of interest to me or to my regular readers but, sooner than later, I will start regular blogging again.

As my readers know that I am a great believer in Synchronicity and just as I was scratching my head to find something to blog about I came across an article that made it possible for a blog post at least for today,

This is Shackman. He and I write on the same topic every Friday as 2 on 1 Friday posts. He and I motivate each other to write at least one post every week.And this is yours truly.

“Having facial hair has variously been a sign of manliness, of unkemptness, of being one with nature, of being Left-leaning, of being lazy, disinterested even, or just too miserly to invest in a razor.”
~ Arun Janardhan.

I don’t think that any of the above signs fit the two of us. At least in my case, it is simply a matter of having been with a beard for all my adult life to minimise the effects of a severe case of acne vulgaris in my younger days. After that problem stopped bothering me, I could not remove the beard as it had by then become my trade mark as it were.

In the case of Shackman, I suspect that he could not find the time during his difficult days and now, having found it so convenient and becoming, has left it to flourish.

It is however nice to know that the beards rule the world for the time being at least.

while growing the beard to compensate for a bald head happens here, the pony tail with the very very rare occasion, does not. The totally bald look is beginning to appear more routinely than some years ago. There are of course the very lucky cases of alopecia areata!

You and Shackman (and your beards) make me smile. Each in their own way.

One of the advantages of being a woman (Nick will now cry out for equality: “It’s unfair!”) that we don’t have facial hair. Imagine we did. OH MY GOD! What would sort the men from the women? Come to think of it, and I am sure I have mentioned this here before, there is one advantage to beards as you get older, namely to hide a sagging jaw line, a fate I await with trepidation. On which note I am with Nick after all. It is unfair to women not being able to hide a chin’s hamster cheeks under a beard. Unless you are my sister and botox the life out of your features. Soon she’ll have to explain our difference in age when introducing me as her sister. A feat she has nicely circumvented by having excised me from her life. What she has forgotten that there will be funerals in the future. Not least our parents’. Not that, at status quo, I will attend them. But that’s another story.

One facial hair story that stands out is that of my first husband. When our short lived marriage was on its last leg (I was twenty two) the only “revenge” in his disenchantment over me leaving him he could come up with was to come home on a double whammy: Not only had he cut his very long hair to NOTHING, he was clean shaven too. I can’t tell you, Ramana. I was repelled. Leaving aside that we were more or less done anyway I couldn’t bear him touch me after that. In one fell swoop he’d become a stranger to me.

Yes, the power of hair – Delilah I am not.

U

PS, and not an afterthought: It would indeed be nice if you’d blog more often once more, throwing your thoughts onto the page. Same goes for Shackman. If you are short of subjects (as if) I’ll be more than happy to feed some ideas to you.